A friend asked for my thoughts on virtual mastermind groups vs. meeting in person.
Key elements to a successful mastermind:
- Committed participation
- Clear objectives and focus areas
- Diversity of experience
- Ground rules to foster trust and unity
- Skilled facilitation (educate comes from the Latin educare which means ‘to draw out’)
We can be grateful for video sharing technology for the connections that it can and does enable. Video enables geographically separated people to participate. Virtual experiences can make it easier for some people to participate. Video can be recorded – but I would discourage recording a virtual mastermind. People are less likely to be transparent and open.
A mixed physical + virtual meetings is inherently more difficult to do well than an all-virtual or all-physical meeting.
Let’s review the limitations of a virtual gathering:
- It’s difficult to quantify how much communication occurs in ways that you don’t see in a Zoom call. There are things you can’t see in a typical headshot Zoom session – body posture, finger and foot tapping, are they leaning forward or backward slightly?
- We unconsciously pick up on smells and tastes. Even the sound of a conversation is different in a 3D environment than on microphone and speakers. Compare the experience of being at a music concert to watching a video of the same concert.
- Physical meetings have a different “after the meeting” experience which aren’t replicated virtually. Think about all the follow-on conversations you’ve had, sometimes trailing out to lobby and parking lot.
- It’s much more difficult for the facilitator to monitor the sense of a virtual gathering, picking up on cues and subtleties. A leader or presenter also have a more limited range of feedback to gauge how the information is coming across.
It’s certainly possible to manage a virtual mastermind, but I think it’s going to miss elements (including “compression”) of a physical gathering. We can’t fully quantify the biological and spiritual intangibles that come with physical presence with others. It takes skill to facilitate a physical mastermind meeting, too. It’s a craft (a combination of learned skills and art to create something beautiful and useful).
